


What Really Happened

by Ioga



Series: Mielinkäiset - shapeshifters [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dragons, F/M, Mielinkäiset, Rebellion, Shapeshifters - Freeform, Strong Adversary, space dragons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-26
Updated: 2011-09-10
Packaged: 2018-09-30 16:02:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10166642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ioga/pseuds/Ioga
Summary: The old tales say that all shapeshifters evolved from red dragons after a glorious epic battle against evil black dragons. But old tales are known to occasionally bend the truth.Independent "prequel" for Putting On My Otter Shirt.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note: This story takes place in the shapeshifter universe of Putting on my Otter Shirt. As you can probably tell, it too is loosely based on a crazy dream I had. It ended up as an extension of the mythological background of the world, and probably provides me with a plot driver I was looking for in the Otter side (knocking on wood). The story contains a smidgeon of crack; I really couldn't keep myself completely serious while writing about shapeshifting dragons from space. Oops, did I say space? Please look into this red light (flash). We never discussed space or multidimensional viral life forms tapping into minds here. That's to be elaborated in the upcoming companion handbook titled "WTF Is Going On In This World??" ;)

_"In the times of yore, there were dragons. They were shifters, like us, only more ancient and powerful beyond imagining. The black dragons were evil and had no respect for their human side, killing their separate humans mercilessly. The red dragons, who were good and compassionate, saw that what the black dragons did was wrong. One day they got together to slay the evil dragons, and released the humans to live in harmony with them. In time, the red dragons evolved and became all the different species of shifting animal there are. They taught us that humans deserve to live a worthy life too, and that we should help them forget what they have lost so that they will not spend their lives in mourning for what they cannot have."_

That is how the story goes, anyway. But history is written by the winners, and we all know things did not go quite as ancient tales tell it. So what happened, really?

-ooo-

The dragons reign supreme here. Humans are our subservient pawns, faulty weaklings stuck in their sole form and dreadfully limited intellect. They cannot fly; they cannot share thoughts beyond making crude sounds and gestures; and a mere fledgling dragon can tear the limbs off a human, or send him plummeting down from the sky.

The highest form of honour granted to a human is to become a secondary form for a dragon, the king of all creatures. As the lifespan of a dragon is far longer than that of a human, a single dragon can make multiple humans semi-immortal once it comes of age - after living for nearly a full human lifespan, that is. The human mind does not survive the attachment, for the most part, but the speck that then survives for generations is considered completely worth it by most of the poor short-lived creatures.

This “most” used to be “all”, but not any more. A rebellion has been brewing for a while now, among the humans. They would not stand a chance alone, as they are both outwitted and overpowered. Dragons are not easy to plot against, by any means. When in a human form, a dragon is indistinguishable from a non-attached human to other humans. However, dragons can always identify each other as dragons, as they share a form of close-range telepathic communication that no human can even pretend to replicate. Yes, the humans would be lost without our help.

“We” are the Reds. To be sure, we are just another clan of dragons, the lowest of the nobility. But being looked down upon for centuries has made us somewhat sensitive to others in a similar predicament; like humans, we are outwitted and overpowered by the ruling clan, the Blacks, as well as a handful of other minor clans in between, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Personally, I like to think that what we are missing in raw intelligence, we make up in our ability for compassion. But I have to admit that some blacks are close to demigods compared to the rest of us. I am unsure why this is so; some theorize it is because of their particularly pure blood.

But I digress; that was not the story I have set out to tell.

I am Akai, and I am to be the saviour of humans. This is my story of the great rebellion.

I got recruited into the conspiracy early on. I was a mere fledgling, young and full of vigour. I was so young, even that I was not even past my first, congenital human form, which was still going strong. No human had become a sacrifice for me so far, and in my zeal I even considered the possibility that none ever would. It had never been done before, and a preposterous thought, but I could see little harm in not being able to shift into a weaker, albeit more nimble form once my innate human form shrivelled and passed away. I never even considered it a possibility that I myself might somehow be damaged from it: given that humans could be replaced, they were clearly not the central core of us, but more like our equivalent of complicated clothes. But suffice it to say that I was quite alone in my musings, as most of our kind as well as humankind considered such an unnecessary limiting of oneself sheer folly, as well as a potentially dangerous goal with poorly specified reasons.

A land mass had been found beyond the current known realm. It was declared uninteresting by our Queen and her council, but it was what gave life to the conspiracy: there was an alternative world, a world without dragons, as far as we knew. We could take the humans there with us, and start over in a harmonious relationship, with red dragons the compassionate and kind guardians of the new realm. All would benefit. We would build ships, in secret, and guide the humans to the promised land.

In case it was not obvious, the plan did not at all include a cessation of the tradition of human sacrifice. Even among my own clan it was seen as a completely absurd notion. As the finest youths among the servant race were selected for the task, and celebrated as heroes, not even the sacrifices themselves complained; I maintain that this was a sign of their limited intellect rather than an educated analysis of the situation, however.

But I went with it, as an improvement to the status quo, obviously better than nothing. So I traded my battle against windmills for helping the ship-builders keep their crucial project hidden from the other clans. This involved mostly warnings about dragons wandering into the area, so that the construction sites would stay hidden. The sites were deliberately placed in an area where few dragons would wander into, and well beyond the range of anyone being able to sense us.

Sometimes, thankfully rarely, my duties also involved attacking an intruder, to kill them so that they could not carry word back to the others. We were lucky; such cases were mostly lone stragglers, and a few of our kind could take them down by ganging up on them. Anyone wandering around these uninhabited areas could be assumed to be something of a recluse, so no one had been missed too much either. Young blacks ambushed each other from time to time, to weed out weaklings from amongst the ruling class. A well-timed assassination was considered a success in social development, when done within the same clan. For members of an inferior clan to commit such an act would definitely have been punishable by death, so we were quite motivated to not let anyone out alive from our ambushes.

Not all of the stragglers were pushovers, by any means. One day, a sturdy black managed to severely wound me and a few others before going down. It was the turning point of my career in the conspiracy: suddenly, I was no longer useful as a fighter, so there was little point in having me around at the construction site. In my dragon form, even breathing hurt, and in my human form I was worse off than the individual humans because I could not hide from other dragons, should they come close enough.

Worse than useless on-site, I was sent away to find some way to make myself useful. Hanging around in human form around other dragons would raise unnecessary questions, but a use was found for me in the end: I would lead a small task force to acquire some necessary equipment for our future journey.

Do you like my formulation? I do, it sounds a lot better than "to go steal one of the devices needed for the ritual of human sacrifice from a mad hermit". Which is how my peers put it.

It was not _that_ bad, not entirely. It did involve a hermit, an unethical device I would rather not have anything to do with, and theft. But I was just a little bit excited about the task, too.

The "mad hermit", generally known as Lord Kuro, was the most brilliant dragon alive, from one of the finest pure bloodlines to exist. He was an excellent target for our planned theft because he spent most of his time in human form, puttering around devices so sensitive that our own talons would never be able to produce or maintain such things. He represented the culmination of the symbiosis of our two races: a dragon's mind, and a human's deft fingers.

I was something of a fan, you might imagine. Not just because he actually appreciated his secondary form, unlike many others, but also because no one else in the realm could really do what he did. It was said that only the Queen could even endure prolonged thought contact with Lord Kuro without growing restless; he was just that magnificent. As Chief of Research, he was in charge of the maintenance and development of the very artefacts that made our most central rituals work.

Of course, one might ask why such a valuable member of the community was allowed to reside in a secluded valley all by himself. It was said that it was by his own request; the politically incorrect would go as far as quote him saying, "Being around idiots gives me a splitting headache." The rebuttals from people getting a headache or worse from trying to communicate with him, in turn, was not much more flattering.

For him, then, the solitude of living in an otherwise uninhabited valley meant peace from the constant noise of thinkers vastly inferior to himself. For the rebellion, it meant that he was too far from anyone else to reach out and call for help.

-ooo-

We travelled to his abode, me and two humans, under the pretence of delivering a new ritual device to a community of red dragons after the old one had broken down. The excuse for the two humans involved an elaborate social construct resulting from our being the lowest clan of dragons: the only servants we could decorate ourselves with were from an inferior race, so not many bothered. It still happened just enough to be somewhat plausible. The cover story did make me, as their owner willing to travel a stretch on foot just to not have to laboriously carry my own servants around, appear as somewhat mentally defective. I was quite confident that this additional burden was practically nothing compared to being a member of the red clan in the presence of the Chief of Research, however.

If you consider this plot naive and simplistic, you may well be on to something. Bear in mind, however, that plotting against a superior clan was socially so horribly taboo that we were not the only ones inexperienced in such. We hoped that Kuro would not expect our move, either.

It was obvious that he did not get many visitors, as he actually came out to welcome us warmly when we reached his door. We were all in human form, as his house was built for it – housing was needed for his delicate equipment more than himself, after all, and he would hardly spend time around the devices in his primary form.

For a while, I could just gape at him. Instead of a grizzly old wizard, as I had irrationally expected him to look like, the man facing us was young, sympathetic-looking and in a word gorgeous (if you happen to like the type, of course). Slightly shorter than an average man, but with long, nimble fingers befitting his profession, and a pair of piercing gray eyes to utterly lose yourself in. To this day, I am not sure if I benefited or near-wrecked our mission by violently blushing in sheer surprise when he flashed us a hospitable smile.

I managed to stammer our purpose, and in a bout of improvisation I also uncontrollably blurted out that I was also a huge fan of his work. He smiled benevolently, and offered us a tour of the premises as a bonus. We accepted, of course.

All through the tour, he was keeping carefully clear from communicating beyond the human methods; it was socially mildly awkward in a way that could be compared to a human being visibly very careful to not touch anyone else even while in close quarters with them. For my part, I did not particularly mind; it was much harder to lie in shared thought than verbally, and I suspect our plot would have crumbled at the first attempt at thinking my way around the scientist before us.

He told us of his work on the ritual devices at length. Halfway through, he got into his wilder experimentation. I had to bite my teeth to not gasp and cheer when he started to talk about his studies on merging other species than humans and dragons together. He had been working on a way to merge humans with other animals, such as cows, and had formulated a theory that with sufficiently small differences in lifespans, these chimeras could exist without the need of ever changing to a new body.

My companions seemed slightly pale at the concept, but I was mesmerized. Lost in the excitement of the thought experiment, I probed him whether he considered it likely that we could be merged with other animals as well. After raising his eyebrows alarmingly high for a moment, he congratulated me on the idea, stating it demonstrated "a rare ability to think outside the box". The stares I got from the rest of our party were less than appreciative, however; after all, I had just compared their most privileged relatives to domestic animals – say, pigs and sheep. To Kuro, on the other hand, it clearly was but a special case of the underlying chimera theory.

When we started to drift towards the room where he had some spare sacrificial devices ready – the regular kind – he asked us in passing if we had our royal warrant for a new device ready. It was tempting to choke on our own tongues there and then, but instead I hastily played for time by pretending (well, admitting) that it would be a shame to break off so soon, and maybe he could tell us something more about the history of the devices or other things.

He happily obliged, forgetting about the formalities for the time being. As he was explaining the early development of the art of merging, we were busy furiously thinking for a way out of our dilemma. The humans were making gestures at me that definitely communicated a necessity to cause bodily harm to Kuro, but I was torn between the safe completion of the mission and the major unethicality of assaulting the only man in the realm who might free us from human sacrifice in the future.

I may have been slightly biased by his charisma, but I maintain that my argument was quite sound as well, rationalization or not.

Luckily, a way out emerged just as he was explaining how different supporting elements of the ritual came to be. One of them was a mind-altering drug given to the human sacrifice prior to binding them to a dragon, to ease the process and make it appear altogether less gruesome due to reduced screaming, which occasionally was observed to indicate some last-minute indecision on the part of the honoured sacrifice. I noted a supply of said drug on the table. A solution was swiftly forming in my mind.

To shift, one must be conscious. And it just so happens that the mind-altering drug had a similar effect to being knocked out, when it came to being able to open the shift gate and change between bodies. I quietly grabbed a syringe, filled it and gave the signal. My partners in crime took hold of Kuro and I plunged the needle into his neck, emptying it just before he snapped out of his initial shock and began to change forms.

The shimmer of the shift gate opening soon died away, dispersed by Kuro's sudden inability to focus. He turned around, furious, but already his movements were jerky from intoxication. "You... you'd betray your own kind? Do you have any idea what you have done?" He tried to lunge at me, but was held still. We hauled him into a storage room, bound his hands and barricaded the door. It would do; the drug would take a while to wear off, long enough for us to get away. No permanent harm done. Despite knowing this, I still shivered at feeling his groping attempts to call out to me with his mind while swearing some of the most horrible oaths upon us that I had ever heard.

It was high time we made our exit. The two picked up the binding device and the necessary supplies for the ritual, and we left the building. Once outside, we split our ways: I would be too easy to track down in their company, and all our chances of survival were better if I could simply focus on keeping myself under the radar until I was strong enough to put up a fight again. The humans and the device headed to the cover of the trees, while I would take the shortest route out.

I set out to climb the steep, winding path out of the valley. The downside of this route was that I could at any time look back and see the house we came out of; I could not stop myself from nervously glancing back every now and then, even though Kuro would most definitely stay out of it for hours, with the dose I had given him.

My guilt-fuelled intuition was correct this time, however. By the time I had made it over the top ledge, a final glance back revealed a speck of a figure outside the small house, against all reason. I realized that I was in clear view against the bright sky.

It felt like a ball of lead had just settled itself into my gut. I might have hoped to not have been seen, but the slight groping feeling from a mind searching for mine revealed that his attention was on me. Nevertheless, I reflexively ducked low and started a mad dash for cover.

I did not make it far before I could hear the flapping sound of great wings. Kuro, who had recovered his dragon form all too soon, was just clearing the ledge. His shadow passed my vision before I could see him before me.

I stumbled into a halt as he gracefully landed a few steps away, his blueish-black scales gleaming in the sunlight. In his dragon form, Lord Kuro was the embodiment of raw power. I furtively tried to apply reason against the terror that such close proximity to a fully-grown drake had on all human bodies, but it was simply overwhelming. My knees turned to jelly, and I could not help but retreat a few steps.

He let out a bellowing roar. "Show your real face, traitor, and fight me for your puny life!" He lifted a foreleg and pushed it against my chest threateningly, his talons separated from my frantically beating heart by nothing but a fragile ribcage.

"I-I would obey, Lord Kuro, but my other body is b-badly wounded. I would likely not remain conscious for long." My voice was pathetically shrill in my ears, trembling and weak.

By remaining in my secondary form rather than responding to his demand to fight him in a theoretically even duel, I would die without honour. It would be slightly better than to shift only to pass out before my opponent, as he would be even more furious for being denied his kill.

To my surprise, Lord Kuro expressed his frustration by simply giving me a minor shove that sent me stumbling on my backside. "Hrmph. To be caught off guard by such a bunch of incompetents! I have spent too much time out here." He took a few steps and moved his scaly face close to mine, locking my eyes with a piercing stare. "You will tell me what the purpose of this excursion was, then I will decide on a suitable form of eternal torture for you, fledgling schemer."

 


	2. Chapter 2

Lord Kuro grabbed me into his talons, spread his wings and leaped into the air again, turning towards the valley. A gut-wrenching glide later, we were back at his house. He pushed me in through the door, shimmered back into his human form and entered, right after wiping his feet on the door mat. 

He had not killed me yet. I was still coming to grips with having my limbs intact and not bleeding to death when he grabbed my wrist and led me to his study. 

"One binding device, and related equipment are gone. What use would humans possibly have for them? Is this some puny attempt at sabotage? Do they expect to operate the thing without proper training?"

I tried to gauge the danger to my fellow conspirators from revealing our plans to this mad scientist, but could only concentrate on the memory of his talons against my chest. Realistically speaking, I was going to die sooner or later, so taking my secrets to the grave would have been noble and all that. But hot damn, it was hard to shake off generations of subservience when a superior being demands information of you.

At my minute hesitation, he snorted. "I can just tear the answers from you, if you insist on being pig-headed as well as an incompetent fool. After that, I'll go shred your little minions into appetizers and carry their remains here in a bucket to repaint my walls with. Now speak, and stop wasting both our time."

"I... but aren't you going to shred us into appetizers anyway?" The gleam in his eyes was definitely scary, but more in an unpredictable than acutely lethal way. I was starting to get drunk on all the adrenaline my system had been flooded with.

He raised an eyebrow at me, and I immediately felt appropriately reprimanded for asking such a stupid question before a supreme genius. "I may opt to skip to dessert instead. Humans give me indigestion." 

I put my hand on my chest and bowed my head, an old gesture of submission, and reached out to share my thoughts with him. It was infinitely more efficient than trying to communicate by words, even though he had the unusual tendency to speak with sounds even between the two of us. Proper contact had the added benefit of near-guaranteed truthfulness; lying required a great deal more skill when nonverbal communication came with no background noise to hide it.

My summary was over in the blink of an eye; the conspiracy to sneak the rebelling humans out from the dragon realm, to restore a harmonious relationship between them and red dragons in the new promised land, and to hope for best that the others would not miss the escapees badly enough to come mess with the new colony.

When I momentarily saw the whole thing through the eyes of the brilliant black before me, I felt it must have been a naive, infinitely flawed concoction doomed to failure.

He just slouched for a moment. Then lifted a palm to his face. Then the other palm. Then he ran his hands through his hair as if trying to brush off the potentially contagious stupidity.

"So this is the quality of national security issues of late? By the stars, I definitely have not spent enough time isolated in here." 

I wrinkled my nose and was almost tempted to rebut. I contained the urge to talk back with some effort, in the name of continued existence and all that.

He continued, "Why don't they just give you the damned devices and wave you off? What bloody good does an overabundance of misbehaving humans do for us anyway? If they manage to get themselves out and spare us the trouble, splendid for us, splendid for them. Did you ever just ask for them?" 

My jaw dropped. One does not simply ask for supplies for treasonous acts. From his frown, I realized I had not let go of his mind yet, and my stray thoughts were leaking to him as well. So much for not talking back, then.

"It sounds like the management has gotten more backwards than I wish to recall. Very well then," he broke off our contact in mid-sentence, "I will help you reach your goal. That device you pilfered won't help you for very many generations even if you get it to work, but my latest invention will render it unnecessary." He jabbed my chest with a finger. "In return, you'll stay here and do my dishes for me."

My well-formulated argument on the topic was accidentally condensed into a single "Gwha?"

He waved his hand and turned away. "I'm just kidding. You'll stay here until I invent a suitable form of eternal torture for you, as promised. In the meantime, you can try to convince me that your overall incompetence does not extend to household chores." His face melted into a smug smile. "...Or to setting up a brilliant experiment that will change all our future, for that matter. You can follow simple instructions without being intellectually overwhelmed, right?"

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed already, I nodded mutely at his back.

-ooo-

Lord Kuro was a huge black dragon. He was also rather sympathetic-looking in his human form. I had tried to concentrate on how the current face of his had been someone else originally, but could not. It still made him look fetching. My memory of his real form was even more impressed, due to having had the ant perspective of my human form when seeing it.

The thing was, Kuro could be quite charming if he wanted to. He just hardly ever seemed to bother. As a result, he was really quite painful to be around. Particularly considering that I seriously wanted to keep him in a good mood and progressing the conspiratorial cause, and therefore had to bite my tongue hard whenever his unpredictable antics made me forget what he was.

By the first evening, when I was doing some menial hauling tasks as a part of setting up some kind of a testbed for his idea to bind humans to animals, I slipped. I told him in a somewhat disrespectful tone that I would be a lot more effective if instead of telling me where exactly to put each specific item, he would give me some overview of what the outcome should generally look like and only give more detailed instructions when I got the details wrong.

Instead of snapping back at me, Kuro stopped what he was doing and looked at me strangely. "You want to know what we are doing?"

I boggled at the question. Of course I did! "Is it so strange that I would be curious about this, when it can change the future of our two species forever?"

Kuro waved my comment aside. "I mean, do you really want to know? Even if it took you years to digest and possibly drove you insane on the side?"

"I have to admit I do not really see how knowledge of this device could cause insanity," present company excluded, I added to myself, "but yes - I assume there are smaller things I could learn even before being able to build something like this all by myself?"

Kuro looked both genuinely delighted and amused at the same time. It was two parts mind-boggling and three parts endearing. "It is not very often that people want to actually know. They prefer to push buttons and trust that I will be there to fix things for them when they break."

It was kind of strange hearing something like that even from from the Chief of Research. He would eventually have to find an apprentice to take over his work, and I was hoping that there would be several in line already in case something suddenly happened to him. And it could not have been very long since he were apprenticed himself. He was nowhere near the oldest dragon in the realm; he was still in his prime, maybe going through his fifth human by now. 

I was more curious about the experimental ritual device than anything else, though, so I just decided to ask him about the whole apprenticing business later. "I think I can be more useful in this project with more knowledge, but I would also like to know for myself."

Kuro was thinking. I could almost see smoke coming from his ears. After a while, he nodded to himself. "Very well. We can try some basics first. I have to warn you, though, that some of this knowledge is actually painful. It will make you feel more alone, even more so for being one of the very few who know it. I can try to protect you for a while, but if you happen to start connecting the dots yourself, there are no guarantees what you'll run into. If you get into this, I won't mislead you just to protect your old world view."

This all seemed kind of elaborate, and I could not exactly ask him what it was he was talking about. "You mean... like I might find out that some kind of a curse will kill me and not feel like living my remaining life as a result? I think I would still want to know." I hoped that would be suitably reassuring.

I got the impression that he harrumphed at my use of a "curse" as an example, but agreed anyway. "Very well. We will start with some small things; I will try to make it understandable for you, but you do understand, I have not had anyone to teach for ages, so let me know when you start to feel overwhelmed."

Then he reached out to me me with his mind, with a slight awkwardness that could be compared to a shaky hand, and set out to share his thoughts with me. The connections mostly went one way; I had no idea what to expect based on pouring my report of the conspiracy on him earlier.

Despite this, I was not really expecting to feel like a tidal wave swept over my mind, flushing away everything in its wake. It did not last long; I passed out.

-ooo-

I came to in a bed. Apparently Kuro had hauled me off the floor and into his own sleeping quarters. It was light outside already; I grunted in disbelief at the sight. My head felt fuzzy, but was not hurting as such. 

Okay, so maybe learning this binding ritual thing might take a bit longer than expected.

Kuro had apparently heard me, as he showed up before I got around to getting up. He looked slightly concerned. "How are you feeling?" 

"I'm hungry, and my head feels a bit fuzzy, but I'm fine. I'm sorry about this, you could have just woken me up rather than letting me hog your bed all night." I wondered if he had slept on the floor.

He glanced aside. "I got a second bed already. It's fine." 

A second bed already? That was efficient. As far as I could tell, he had not had one before I got here. "You had one stashed away?"

"No, I asked for one to be brought." Seeing my blank stare, he added nervously, "You were out for two days."

My jaw dropped. Two days? But... I did not feel like having been bedridden at all. "Surely you're joking. I would feel it if I slept for two days straight. I'm just hungry, not famished."

I could sense his mind twitching, wanting to tell me but holding back. I realized that if this was what people went through when he tried to explain anything the normal way, he had good reason to stick to just words.

"Ah... you know how your second body does not get hungry or stiff while you're spending time in the other body? I took the reason for that and made it apply to both of you at the same time while you were recovering. It's a bit of a long story, but I didn't know if your mind had been damaged so I hooked you up to the placenta to keep you stored in case you wouldn't wake up, until you went from comatose to just sleeping." He was using strange words that I did not know I knew; only the concepts came through like flashing images of the meanings of long-forgotten foreign language.

I suddenly realized that Kuro had been reduced to babbling in jargon; I wondered if he had been actually shaken. I was suddenly embarrassed; rather than speed things up, I had inconvenienced him and caused a distraction. "I'm sorry if I made you worry, Lord Kuro."

He responded by patting my hand, an affectionate gesture out of the blue. "It's alright, poor dear. You're just so young, it's hard to even imagine how young." As if realizing the strangeness of the outburst, he straightened up and adjusted the fabric of his clothes. "I'll try to find some way to teach you without doing physical damage, if you're still curious."

I smiled encouragingly, feeling privileged that he was still willing to go through even more trouble to pass me his knowledge. Then I recalled my earlier question. "I was wondering, actually... Are you able to speak with others?" Was it just me that got comatose from trying to listen to him, or was he really isolated from ever connecting with others?

His eyebrows rose. "Barely out of bed, and you're looking for generalizations. We'll make a scientist out of you yet." Then a sad look overtook the appreciation in his eyes. "You're right, unfortunately. The only dragon alive who can endure thinking with me is the Queen. Most people complain they want to gouge their eyes out just listening to me speaking."

To think of having to self-impose such a strict separation between yourself and other people just to not cause them brain damage... I started to understand where Kuro might have gotten some of his insanity from. 

-ooo-

We set up some further experiments, and while I still needed to be told what to put where, I sometimes found I could fill in some of Kuro's explanatory sentences with terms that came to me like memories of old dreams. It was clear that something had caught from the connection before I had blacked out, and it was sufficiently encouraging to give the more effective teaching method a second try. 

So, once Kuro felt we reached a phase in the work that did not require me for a couple of days, he cautiously tried to teach me again. This time he picked something reasonably irrelevant and less innately familiar to himself; excerpts from our history.

According to him, I only stood staring blankly at the wall for half an hour afterwards. He was quite proud of his restraint. I could not really remember much more than being hit by another tidal wave.

Thanks to our little experimentation on pushing the limits of shared cognition, my dreams were never boring. The historical touch got my subconscious plunging straight into vessels flying to the stars, depicted in imagery so vivid that I wondered if it was my imagination that was so thoroughly inspired - or if Kuro had actually spent the time coming up with such thoughts. He did not seem the type to pay attention to upholstery, though, so I concluded the fantasies were likely to be my own.

We had once travelled far beyond what our own wings could take us, as the legends told, and the different clans had tasks divided between them according to their ability. The blacks were the clever ones, the aggressive ones, leaders and planners, while we, the reds, got the job done and kept everything going in practice. And so on, and so forth. We had settled this world, bringing humans with us, and formed it according to our needs.

Over time, our knowledge of spacefaring and other skills that were not continuously needed in our new habitat faded. The rigid traditions to ensure the continuity of the community, such as the replacement process of the Queen and Chief Scientist by the best of the breed were set, and the selection process as well as extensive training performed in strictest secrecy ensured that the political views of the new Queen or the skills of the new Chief Scientist were never very far from the old. This provided important stability, while the high lords below the Queen were free to make some local adjustments in how to implement the Queen's will. The duties of the two kinds of leaders of dragons were so integral to our society, however, that there was no space for individual freedoms; in fact, during the training period, it was tradition that the replacement adopted the name of their predecessor. 

In other words, the Chief Scientist was always known as Lord Kuro.

The realization woke me up; I still thought of Kuro by the name of his position only, and for some reason I was overwhelmed by the need to identify him as the person he was behind it. How could I go through such incredible experiences with someone and I still not even know his real name?

I brought this up when we were setting out to work. Lord Kuro chuckled uneasily and shrugged. "I gave all that up when I became what I am. But if it makes you feel better, you can call me Zacharius."

I blushed at the implication that we would be on a first-name basis; I had been hoping... Come to think of it, I had no idea what I had been hoping. But it was clear that I could not go about addressing him with that sort of familiarity. Despite this, the knowledge made me feel better. I knew something that was personal to him, not just the mantle of duty he wore.

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note: Thanks for reading! Minor edits to this chapter and the next one Apr'12 based on reviews (on FF), thank you!


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